Nasheed, Rasheeda, SBI: Maldives' long tryst with India

Years ago, when radio was the only source of electronic entertainment, a station from Maldives used to broadcast Hindi songs at day-break as I prepared to go to school. Punctuated by some unintelligible language, which I later learned was a sanskritised Dhivehi, the 5.30 a.m. programme played hit Hindi songs of the time. By about 6 o’ clock, the broadcast would lose its quality and dissipate into static and ether. The only other thing that I knew about Maldives then was that the President of the country was a charming Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who visited India often. Apparently, only Amitabh Bachhan matched his popularity in his country. Not that I wasn’t familiar with Maldivians. They always flocked to my small city -Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. Stocky men mostly in colourful lungis and floral shirts, and women in burqas. I was told that their island didn’t have many hospitals and they came to my small town for medical treatment. They crowded around the city’s government medical college where many small nursing homes were located. There were daily flights from Thiruvananthapuram to Male, which I later learnt covered just about 400 km, shorter than the distance to Chennai. Several years later, Maldives literally came home. It was 1988, and we now had colour TVs instead of the radio. Doordarshan, the only TV channel then, showed us how a band of Tamil mercenaries, apparently hired by a colombo-based Maldivian businessman, tried to take over the country! Some of them had taken positions in the capital earlier and the last assault was led by men in rags from a boat armed with automatic rifles. They took over every installation in the island, but missed out on telecommunications. Gayoom fled from house to house and finally managed to holler to Rajiv Gandhi for help. In less than 12 hours, which appeared short those days, India’s Russian planes and para-troupers foiled the coup and restored the country to Gayoom. The mercenaries were from PLOTE; many of them were killed, many wounded and many captured. It was India’s only successful military adventure that we saw on TV. And Gayoom pledged his unending loyalty to India. [caption id=“attachment_210674” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“Maldivians sit by the sea front in Male, Maldives, Saturday evening, 11 February, 2012 . AP Photo”] [/caption] Along with the clips of India’s victory, Doordarshan also reported on the wonders of a tiny country called Maldives. Hundreds of islands, life mostly on water, a teeny-weeny capital where people seemed to just relax and enjoy life. And most of them appeared to love India; they sang Hindi songs and even spoke some words in Hindi. I was amazed by the information that one can cycle the city, edge-to-edge, in about ten minutes and that daily joggers circled the periphery of the city several times a day. With just about 300,000 people, it was not even bigger than a small village in India. Of course, later exposure to countries such as Cook Islands or Solomon Islands in the Pacific made me realise that sovereignty was not about the size, or numbers of its citizens, but about an identity, culture and tradition. Now I knew where the Maldivians came from. No wonder, the legendary traveller Ibn Battuta was so sentimental about the island(s) nation. As LP Harvey wrote in his analysis of Ibn Battuta’s travelogues: “Ibn Battuta was no sentimentalist, but when he arrived back in his home region, the Maghreb, the Maldives were, apart from the holy shrines of Arabia, perhaps the only place to which his thoughts nostalgically returned.” It was about their food, their hospitality and their women! Six years later, it was a Maldivian woman who brought the country back into our lives. A big eyed Mariam Rasheeda would dominate our thoughts and politics for a few years to come. Mariam Rasheeda was among the several Maldivians who frequented my city. (Other than coming there for treatment, many Maldivians also sent their children to Thiruvananthapuram and Bangalore for education. Later my Maldivian friends had told me that the rich ones sent their kids to England or Malaysia for schooling, the next quintile sent their kids to Colombo and perhaps the next, sent them to India. Of course, the poorer ones stayed back or went to some island school) After a routine trip to Thiruvananthapuram, Mariam Rasheeda was about to go back to her country. A local policeman charged her and her friend, a slightly older TV actress called Fauzia, with overstaying and raided their hotel room. A diary with some telephone numbers, one of which allegedly belonged to a staff of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), resulted in the biggest spy-joke of the century in India that ruined the lives of many senior scientists including a top-ranking rocket specialist. The largest selling newspaper in Kerala, that made money by peddling trivia, sent their reporters to Maldives to write serialised thrillers on international espionage: the ISI of Pakistan hiring two Maldivian bombshells to honey-trap Indian scientists and steal our rocket science! A few years later, after almost every investigating agency vigorously wasting its time, the Supreme Court found the case to be baseless.Poor Mariam Rasheeda and Fauzia languished in Kerala jails for some more time and perhaps picked up some Malayalam, which is close to Dhivehi. One of my Maldivian friends recently promised to get me in touch with Fauzia. “Write about her, it will be thrilling,” she said. Nobody really knows where Mariam Rasheeda is, but people of my generation will always remember her. She was a household name, a sultry mystery, a bombshell who tried to steal our rockets! she was the first ambassador of Maldives for us; an example of the attractive women that Ibn Battuta raved about. Since then, Maldives more or less disappeared from our scheme of things except perhaps for the irrelevant SAARC meetings that India couldn’t care less about. However, by the 2000s, glossy travel magazines and high definition travel shows told us how breathtaking the island was. It was a coral paradise where Tom Cruise went with Katie Holmes; where a constellation of tiny islands boasted of seven star resorts with guestbooks sporting names such as Davina McCall, Josh Duhamel, Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie, Natascha McElhone, Sienne Miller, Jodie Kidd, Ashley and Cheryl Cole, Philip Treacy, Sienna Guillory and Gail Porter and our own Salman Khan and Shilpa Shetty. Continues on the next page Finally I succumbed to the temptation in 2005. It was strange. You land on a strip of concrete right into the sea. You step out and it is sea and your taxi is in fact a boat. The capital Male is a few minutes away by boat. Everybody seems to live on water. Male is an overcrowded speck of land with small streets, swank boats, good looking as well as tacky buildings, small hotel rooms, and a lot of video shops with Indian DVDs. TVs running Indian soaps dubbed into Dhivehi and sometimes, in Hindi itself. The biggest star by the time the recently ousted President Nasheed fought the elections in 2008 was an Indian television actress called Sweta Tiwari and the soap was titled Prerna. During the campaign, people in Nasheed’s camp told me that if they could get “Prerna” to campaign for him, he would win hands down. The speed-boat rides in Maldives are extra-ordinary and the resorts are out of the world. The guests are dominated by rich and discerning Japanese and Europeans. The unique US$ 1000 per night cottages built above breathtaking blue waters, the shallow seafront and, the sun and sand that poetically change colours as the day progresses, make Maldives look like a dream. It looks more real than the high definition images. Now I was curious about this wonderland. They had nothing but coconuts and tuna, everything else was imported! No dogs and cattle! People took to boats as we take to our autos. Women looked and behaved empowered, men looked chilled out. There was no anxiety or even a remote possibility of violence. I also met many fellas from my home-state Kerala, who were teaching in schools there. A country with a per capita income of US$ 4,600, the highest in South Asia, still calling themselves a least developed country (LDC) for international aid reasons (till recently); where a lot of youngsters escape to Colombo on the weekends to have fun; and where you see sartorial contradictions such as politicians wearing western clothes and ties while senior officials on overseas tours wearing flip-flops and faded t-shirts. They cannot live without tuna, which they fish using a unique hook-line-and-sinker method, billed as the most environment-friendly in the world. Maldives was my new wonderland. And then there was Nasheed, whom the Amnesty called a “Prisoner of Conscience.” The poster boy of the campaign against global warming and the star of the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. Maldives has more connections with India, or precisely my state, Kerala. I met this minister whose first name was Aishath. She looked like somebody I very closely knew in Malabar (northern part of Kerala). She was elegant and beautiful. Hers was similar to a common name in Kerala - Aisha. Then I lost count of the names that sounded so similar. Apparently the earliest settlers of Maldives were the fisherfolk from Kerala in 300 BC or so. Therefore, it is not amusing to find a Dravidian-Malayalam flavour in their family names, culture, art forms, food, names etc. They look different from us, thanks to the interesting racial mixing that happened, but some are strikingly similar to an average Keralite. A 25-plus Maldivian whom I took for a fellow-Keralite, spoke fluent Malayalam. He was raised and educated in Thiruvananthapuram till his masters. He told me that there were many more like him. People rent out their homes, which look like rabbit hutches, in Male, for roughly 1000 dollars a month, and live an easy life in Thiruvananthapuram sending their children to good schools and colleges. One of the ministers in the Nasheed cabinet, whom I knew, had his relatives living in Thiruvananthapuram. Maldives is also a source of bridegrooms for poor Muslim women in a poor neighbourhood near Thiruvananthapuram. The only exception in this case is that the men are at least three times older and often the girls are minors. The local people have a term for this phenomenon - “Malikkalyaanam” (Male-wedding). In most cases, it is exploitative and the girls are abandoned when the old bridegroom goes back. Anyway, other than the socio-cultural links with my state, India has been a source of strength for Maldives, not just for Gayoom and Nasheed. Years ago, Koli Manik, celebrated as the father of the Maldivian tourism industry and the architectural style of spas that one sees across Asia, wanted capital for his business, it was a loan from State Bank of India that helped him. It was the first bank in the island. The island has been an example of a progressive, democratic Muslim country; but of late, there is a disturbing surge of hardliners. An Indian hardline cleric-speaker is popular in the island and one can frequently see his footage on TV and video shops. Is Nasheed’s downfall a victory for hardliners? Some say no and that he has compromised with the hardliners and also lost his popularity although he is a charmer. There is an increasing menace of cultural policing, which even trace expat Maldivian women and hack their Facebook accounts. The island is under threat of submersion because of global warming. However, the immediate threat is the possible submersion of its fledgling democracy, free speech, progressive values and an otherwise non-combative people. Proxy politics and radicalisation can irreversibly impair the delicate balance that is unique to the country.